Google Cloud Accelerates Enterprise Push With Alooma Buy

Google Cloud officials continued to make a push this week for more enterprise business with the acquisition of a startup whose technology make it easier for businesses to migrate their data into the company’s public cloud.

Google’s George Kurian

The purchase of Alooma comes just a week after Thomas Kurian, the former longtime Oracle executive who in November became senior vice president of Google’s cloud division, told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference that the company will compete more aggressively and accelerate growth faster than in the past as it looks to better compete with market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

It also comes the same week that Google Cloud introduced its Cloud Services Platform, which advances its hybrid cloud efforts by giving customers a way of running Google Cloud services and applications in their own on-premises data centers.

Kurian noted that included growing the sales team, but the comments also set off speculation that Google Cloud could be in the market to make some major acquisitions to more quickly grow its capabilities and make it a more attractive alternative for enterprises. The deal for Alooma wouldn’t qualify as a major deal — the five-year-old company has raised $15 million — but making it easier for businesses to move their data into the cloud is an important feature to offer.

“As organizations modernize their infrastructure to digitally transform themselves, migrating mission critical systems and the data that powers their business success can be daunting,” Amit Ganesh, vice president of engineering, and Dominic Preuss, director of product management at Google Cloud Platform, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “No matter where your data is stored — on-premises, in our cloud, or multiple clouds — we want to make that information accessible, valuable, and actionable. … Alooma helps enterprise companies streamline database migration in the cloud with an innovative data pipeline tool that enables them to move their data from multiple sources to a single data warehouse.”

Alooma, which had been a partner of Google Cloud, offers a platform that brings data from a variety of sources — such as databases, applications and APIs — into a single data warehouse in real time and gives enterprises a pipeline for migrating the data into multiple clouds.

“It’s a way for your data workflows to get connected in a cloud endpoint or a cloud framework, and connected into a cloud pipeline,” IDC analyst Deepak Mohan told ChannelFutures. “It’s a way to work across multiple cloud providers.”

Other providers have similar tools, and the Alooma deal comes on the heels of AWS’ acquisition last month of cloud migration, backup and disaster recovery services vendor CloudEndure. It also complements Google’s acquisition of cloud migration startup Velostrata last year, Mohan said.

As more organizations look to leverage the scalability, agility…